Nice to see you back here on the mb, and for your contribution to this thread. I would suggest that the time used for the chart above is not correct as this would correlate with very late hours. If you can find the accurate time please re-post the chart.

"If Barack Obama or Mitt Romney weren’t telling the truth at any point in last night’s debate, it appears they believed their own lies. The group that got buzz on Wednesday by paying a security firm to use new truth detecting technology to give both candidates a lie-detector test during the debate said the preliminary results do not indicate any major lies from Obama or Romney."

Pundits from both sides of the aisle have lauded Mitt Romney’s strong debate performance, praising his preparedness and ability to challenge President Obama’s policies and accomplishments. But Romney only accomplished this goal by repeatedly misleading viewers. He spoke for 38 minutes of the 90 minute debate and told at least 27 myths:

1) “Get us energy independent, North American energy independent. That creates about 4 million jobs”. Romney’s plan for “energy independence” actually relies heavily on a study that assumes the U.S. continues with fuel efficiency standards set by the Obama administration. For instance, he uses Citigroup research based off the assumption that “‘the United States will continue with strict fuel economy standards that will lower its oil demand.” Since he promises to undo the Obama administration’s new fuel efficiency standards, he would cut oil consumption savings of 2 million barrels per day by 2025.

2) “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about.” A Tax Policy Center analysis of Romney’s proposal for a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut in all federal income tax rates, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax, eliminating the estate tax and other tax reductions, would reduce federal revenue $480 billion in 2015. This amount to $5 trillion over the decade.

3) “My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.” If Romney hopes to provide tax relief to the middle class, then his $5 trillion tax cut would add to the deficit. There are not enough deductions in the tax corde that primarily benefit rich people to make his math work.

4) “My — my number-one principal is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to underline that: no tax cut that adds to the deficit.” As the Tax Policy Center concluded, Romney’s plan can’t both exempt middle class families from tax cuts and remain revenue neutral. “He’s promised all these things and he can’t do them all. In order for him to cover the cost of his tax cut without adding to the deficit, he’d have to find a way to raise taxes on middle income people or people making less than $200,000 a year,” the Center found.

5) “I will not under any circumstances raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families. Now, you cite a study. There are six other studies that looked at the study you describe and say it’s completely wrong.” The studies Romney cites actually further prove that Romney would, in fact, have to raise taxes on the middle class if he were to keep his promise not to lose revenue with his tax rate reduction.

6) “I saw a study that came out today that said you’re going to raise taxes by $3,000 to $4,000 on middle-income families.” Romney is pointing to this study from the American Enterprise Institute. It actually found that rather than raise taxes to pay down the debt, the Obama administration’s policies — those contained directly in his budget — would reduce the share of taxes that go toward servicing the debt by $1,289.89 per taxpayer in the $100,000 to $200,000 range.

7) “And the reason is because small business pays that individual rate; 54 percent of America’s workers work in businesses that are taxed not at the corporate tax rate, but at the individual tax rate….97 percent of the businesses are not — not taxed at the 35 percent tax rate, they’re taxed at a lower rate. But those businesses that are in the last 3 percent of businesses happen to employ half — half of all the people who work in small business.” Far less than half of the people affected by the expiration of the upper income tax cuts get any of their income at all from a small businesses. And those people could very well be receiving speaking fees or book royalties, which qualify as “small business income” but don’t have a direct impact on job creation. It’s actually hard to find a small business who think that they will be hurt if the marginal tax rate on income earned above $250,000 per year is increased.

Cool “Mr. President, all of the increase in natural gas and oil has happened on private land, not on government land. On government land, your administration has cut the number of permits and licenses in half.” Oil production from federal lands is higher, not lower: Production from federal lands is up slightly in 2011 when compared to 2007. And the oil and gas industry is sitting on 7,000 approved permits to drill, that it hasn’t begun exploring or developing.

9) “The president’s put it in place as much public debt — almost as much debt held by the public as all prior presidents combined.” This is not even close to being true. When Obama took office, the national debt stood at $10.626 trillion. Now the national debt is over $16 trillion. That $5.374 trillion increase is nowhere near as much debt as all the other presidents combined.

10) “That’s why the National Federation of Independent Businesses said your plan will kill 700,000 jobs. I don’t want to kill jobs in this environment.” That study, produced by a right-wing advocacy organization, doesn’t analyze what Obama has actually proposed.

11) “What we do have right now is a setting where I’d like to bring money from overseas back to this country.” Romney’s plan to shift the country to a territorial tax system would allow corporations to do business and make profits overseas without ever being taxed on it in the United States. This encourages American companies to invest abroad and could cost the country up to 800,000 jobs.

12) “I would like to take the Medicaid dollars that go to states and say to a state, you’re going to get what you got last year, plus inflation, plus 1 percent, and then you’re going to manage your care for your poor in the way you think best.” Sending federal Medicaid funding to the states in the form of a block grant woud significantly reduce federal spending for Medicaid because the grant would not keep up with projected health care costs. A CBO estimate of a very similar proposal from Paul Ryan found that federal spending would be “35 percent lower in 2022 and 49 percent lower in 2030 than current projected federal spending” and as a result “states would face significant challenges in achieving sufficient cost savings through efficiencies to mitigate the loss of federal funding.” “To maintain current service levels in the Medicaid program, states would probably need to consider additional changes, such as reducing their spending on other programs or raising additional revenues,” the CBO found.

13) “I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare…. But the idea of cutting $716 billion from Medicare to be able to balance the additional cost of Obamacare is, in my opinion, a mistake. There’s that number again. Romney is claiming that Obamacare siphons off $716 billion from Medicare, to the detriment of beneficiaries. In actuality, that money is saved primarily through reducing over-payments to insurance companies under Medicare Advantage, not payments to beneficiaries. Paul Ryan’s budget plan keeps those same cuts, but directs them toward tax cuts for the rich and deficit reduction.

14) “What I support is no change for current retirees and near-retirees to Medicare.” Here is how Romney’s Medicare plan will affect current seniors: 1) by repealing Obamacare, the 16 million seniors receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and are saving $3.9 billion on prescription drugs will see a cost increase, 2) “premium support” will increase premiums for existing beneficiaries as private insurers lure healthier seniors out of the traditional Medicare program, 3) Romney/Ryan would also lower Medicaid spending significantly beginning next year, shifting federal spending to states and beneficiaries, and increasing costs for the 9 million Medicare recipients who are dependent on Medicaid.

15) “Number two is for people coming along that are young, what I do to make sure that we can keep Medicare in place for them is to allow them either to choose the current Medicare program or a private plan. Their choice. They get to choose — and they’ll have at least two plans that will be entirely at no cost to them.” The Medicare program changes for everyone, even people who choose to remain in the traditional fee-for-service. Rather than relying on a guaranteed benefit, all beneficiaries will receive a premium support credit of $7,500 on average in 2023 to purchase coverage in traditional Medicare or private insurance. But that amount will only grow at a rate of GDP plus 1.5 percentage points and will not keep up with health care costs. So while the federal government will spend less on the program, seniors will pay more in premiums.

16) “And, by the way the idea came not even from Paul Ryan or — or Senator Wyden, who’s the co-author of the bill with — with Paul Ryan in the Senate, but also it came from Bill — Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.” Romney has rejected the Ryan/Wyden approach — which does not cap the growth of the “premium support” subsidy. Bill Clinton and his commission also voted down these changes to the Medicare program.

17) “Well, I would repeal and replace it. We’re not going to get rid of all regulation. You have to have regulation. And there are some parts of Dodd-Frank that make all the sense in the world.” Romney has previously called for full repeal of Dodd-Frank, a law whose specific purpose is to regulate banks. MF Global’s use of customer funds to pay for its own trading losses is just one bit of proof that the financial industry isn’t responsible enough to protect consumers without regulation.

18) “But I wouldn’t designate five banks as too big to fail and give them a blank check. That’s one of the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank… We need to get rid of that provision because it’s killing regional and small banks. They’re getting hurt.” The law merely says that the biggest, systemically risky banks need to abide by more stringent regulations. If those banks fail, they will be unwound by a new process in the Dodd-Frank law that protects taxpayers from having to pony up for a bailout.

19) “And, unfortunately, when — when — when you look at Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office has said it will cost $2,500 a year more than traditional insurance. So it’s adding to cost.” Obamacare will actually provide millions of families with tax credits to make health care more affordable.

20) “t puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have. I don’t like that idea.” The Board, or IPAB is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Congress can accept the savings proposal or implement its own ideas through a super majority. The panel’s plan will modify payments to providers but it cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost-sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria” (Section 3403 of the ACA). Relying on health care experts rather than politicians to control health care costs has previously attracted bipartisan support and even Ryan himself proposed two IPAB-like structures in a 2009 health plan.

21) “Right now, the CBO says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect next year. And likewise, a study by McKinsey and Company of American businesses said 30 percent of them are anticipating dropping people from coverage.” The Affordable Care Act would actually expand health care coverage to 30 million Americans, despite Romney fear mongering. According to CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, 3 million or less people would leave employer-sponsored health insurance coverage as a result of the law.

22) “I like the way we did it [health care] in Massachusetts…What were some differences? We didn’t raise taxes.” Romney raised fees, but he can claim that he didn’t increase taxes because the federal government funded almost half of his reforms.

23) “It’s why Republicans said, do not do this, and the Republicans had — had the plan. They put a plan out. They put out a plan, a bipartisan plan. It was swept aside.” The Affordable Care Act incorporates many Republican ideas including the individual mandate, state-based health care exchanges, high-risk insurance pools, and modified provisions that allow insurers to sell policies in multiple states. Republicans never offered a united bipartisan alternative.

24) “Preexisting conditions are covered under my plan.” Only people who are continuously insured would not be discriminated against because they suffer from pre-existing conditions. This protection would not be extended to people who are currently uninsured.

25) “In one year, you provided $90 billion in breaks to the green energy world. Now, I like green energy as well, but that’s about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives.” The $90 billion was given out over several years and included loans, loan guarantees and grants through the American Recovery Act. $23 billion of the $90 billion “went toward “clean coal,” energy-efficiency upgrades, updating the electricity grid and environmental clean-up, largely for old nuclear weapons sites.”

26) “I think about half of [the green firms Obama invested in], of the ones have been invested in have gone out of business. A number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.” As of late last year, only “three out of the 26 recipients of 1705 loan guarantees have filed for bankruptcy, with losses estimated at just over $600 million.”

27) “If the president’s reelected you’ll see dramatic cuts to our military.” Romney is referring to the sequester, which his running mate Paul Ryan supported. Obama opposes the military cuts and has asked Congress to formulate a balanced approach that would avoid the trigger.

Last night, I told nervous Obama supporters that Obama would hit Romney with fact-checking today and it would be brutal. And here we go. Obama is hitting Romney on the trail, fact-checkers are having a field day with Romney, and now the ads have started.

Here is your first TV ad from the Obama campaign, called “Trust”. If you can’t trust Romney in the debate, how can you trust him in the White House?

Voice-over:“Why won’t Romney level with us about his tax plan which gives the wealthy huge new tax breaks? Because according to experts he’d have to raise taxes on the middle class or increase the deficit to pay for it. If we can’t trust him here how could we ever trust him here?”

Here’s a small roundup of the response to Romney’s fairy tale presentation of his positions last night:

CNN’s David Gergen: “Romney was just sort of flat out lying.”

Bloomberg News: “Romney’s tax plan can’t add up.”

CNBC Fact Check: “Romney again tonight did not say specifically how he would pay for his proposed across the board tax cut.”

Liberals can’t stand seeing the President bullied and not fighting back. It brings up painful memories of lost elections stemming from unchecked Republican lies about patriotism and purple band-aids. But Obama is not John Kerry. Obama is not Jimmy Carter. Obama is not a wimp.

If anyone in this election is a wimp, it is Mitt Romney — as even Newsweek pointed out months ago. Romney is so desperate to be liked that he will tell the voters anything, do anything, to get their approval in this moment. But he will change it all tomorrow or the next hour to get someone else’s approval. He is fickle, two-faced and back-stabbing. He stands for nothing except the sleaze of an unethical used car salesman. This is what Americans think wins a debate? Bullying and lies?

Perhaps Americans are that silly. I don’t happen to think they are. But at any rate, Obama is not trying to win a debate. He’s trying to win an election. There is a big difference. Ask Sarah Palin about that. She is foolish enough to be gloating today over Romney’s performance, because Palin loves it when anyone takes a cheap shot at the President since she never managed to land a punch.

The country needs to lift itself up from the Right, not stoop down to their level. We are not electing bully-in-chief. We already had one of those and it didn’t work out so well. Fact lovers worry that the average voter didn’t hear the truth last night, and I agree. They didn’t.

But there isn’t anything Obama could have done about that without coming down to Romney’s level. Romney stood on that stage and reinvented his entire tax plan, disowning everything he’s been saying for the past year. Have you ever fought a serial liar in public? Engaging with them on their every lie is a mistake, because a misinformed public who do not understand the issues will falsely equate your growing hysteria with the lies of the serial liar. The mud spreads.

Obama did what he had to do. He was put in a bad position – how to catch a slippery liar who keeps changing their position? Punch air? He rose above it, spoke to the people directly, and he let the fact-checkers do their job. Today, he’s taking his case to the people in swing states. This man is not a wimp. But if his opponents want to make that same mistake again, fighting their fictional Obama, that will no doubt be just fine with the Obama camp.

In case anyone forgot, in 2008 Obama had the exact same strategy. He does not play the aggressive, angry man. He makes his rational, calm case to the public. He waits until the public has made up their mind about who is being dishonest or unfair, and when even the Independents are screaming “Why doesn’t he hit back!?”, Obama finally delivers the smooth, never-nasty knock out.

There is nothing more damaging for a candidate than having their own words used against them. It proves that they are not trustworthy and no matter what the pundits say, trust and likeability matter at the polls. George W Bush came across as a decent guy; Mitt Romney does not. Romney is a serial liar, who seems to garner smug pleasure from getting away with it at the moment. Mitt Romney is only fooling himself and what is left of his base. Sure, he took some “Undecideds” last night, but how are those folks feeling this morning after Romney has been roundly taken to the woodshed for his lies?

By the time the last words were spoken in 2012′s first presidential debate, millions of Americans were no doubt left wondering who Mitt Romney is, and what he stands for. Romney had not managed to make that clear at any previous point in his political career. Mitt Romney, possibly alone among America’s major public figures, has managed to hold just about every position hat can be imagined, left to right.

There are those who think Barack Obama is actually more of an old-fashioned moderate Republican than a moderate Democrat, and many on the left see Barack Obama as being too far toward the center for their liking. But placing Obama on the left-right spectrum is more a matter of perspective, of one’s own point of view, whereas Romney actually shifts positions.

Since the debate, Romney has continued to talk a new language. You would think he had completely disavowed all his former positions. But he has not. He is talking one way, but his actions, or rather, inaction, proves he hasn’t actually changed his mind. Romney wants voters to think he thinks one way while he actually thinks another. He talks about the middle class. He talks about the 100 percent.

But his policies continue to be all about the 1 percent.

What do conservatives think of all this? Aren’t they a little befuddled too? Perhaps the rank and file, unless somebody is carefully explaining it all to them. But Paul Waldman, who is a contributing editor at The American Prospect, seems to point to the lack of outrage on the right when he says,

You won’t hear Republicans saying this newly moderate Romney represents a betrayal. First off, they’re smart enough to realize that Romney hasn’t actually changed any of his plans; all he’s changed is how he talks about them. And second, conservatives have always been good at coming together when power is on the line. The right has just as many factions and just as much infighting as the left, but when Election Day approaches, they become deadly serious about the task at hand. There will be plenty of time for an ideological struggle over the GOP’s identity once the ballots are counted.

I think too that Romney’s incessant attacks against Obama and his flirtation with the most extreme elements within the Republican Party, will obscure a sense of his own “otherness” and cover up his sudden appeal to moderation. The Republican Party has always been about hatred of Obama, after all, and less about policies. The Republicans, as just one example, have always crowed about spending and deficits but it is inevitably Republican administrations that rack up the debt.

You would think even Republican voters would recognize this but they seem to go right along with the propaganda, and I suspect they will go right along with the propaganda again. I can’t think of another political movement in all of American history that has been so resilient in the face of facts. Bill Maher can demolish their claims Obama destroyed America but that sort of thing goes right over their head. It’s just buzzing in their ears even if they bother to listen.

You might say that Mitt Romney has the best possible audience for his Etch A Sketch politics that could be imagined. A man who will say anything to get elected meets an audience that will believe anything to get rid of Obama.

Romney shows very little substance. You can’t be overflowing with substance and be as nimble ideologically as Mitt Romney has been. The ultimate political chameleon, Romney is good at saying what needs to be said, but not so good at making decisions. We saw what happens to a man like him when the pressure is on. He completely crumbled in his first foreign policy forays, not only his reaction to the consulate attack in Libya but in his earlier visit to Europe.

Europeans expected some gravitas; Romney gave them a big, dopey, frat-boy bully. Which is all Romney really is, as he displayed again at the debate. He didn’t actually debate at all. He bullied. And Lehrer, with his “so what?” attitude, let him. Again, Obama displayed the gravitas we all look for. Obama even continued to say what he had said all along. And he did it without telling a lie a minute.

We didn’t see any substance at the debate and there is a very simple reason for this. There is no substance to Mitt Romney. Robert Draper, at the New York Time magazine, talks about Romney’s recent attempts to explain his policies in more detail after months of excuse-making and obfuscation. These, he says, look more as if “they were hatched from a few late-night strategy sessions after a string of bad news days rather than from the candidate’s core philosophy.” Draper makes the observation that Romney’s “campaign tactics reveal only what he would do in order to win, not what he’ll do once he has won.”

I have asked who the real Mitt Romney is politically. I am increasingly certain there is no answer to that question. What Mitt Romney is about, and what Mitt Romney will always be about, is Mitt Romney. His first and last question each day will be, did I do right by Mitt Romney? Asked who the real Mitt Romney is, I would be inclined to answer now that there is no real Mitt Romney beyond the Mitt Romney who will say anything to anybody to get elected.

If Mitt Romney comes across as a man who has no ideas – and he had no ideas when acting as an informal adviser to John McCain in 2008 – in all likelihood we can trust appearances. In his entire political career Romney has not displayed any core philosophy unless his core philosophy is to lie and lie often. They like to say all politicians lie, but no politician in American history has lied with the vigor and enthusiasm of Mitt Romney.

Pragmatic? That might be a word for it, though we like a little principle, a little substance, with our pragmatism. That is a combination displayed to good advantage by our current president, Barack Obama. We like a president who thinks before he speaks, a trick Romney, who is used to bullying and firing people, has never had to learn. Privilege, after all, has its privileges.

And it’s a lie to say we know any more about Mitt Romney than we did going into the debate. If we made a post-debate Mitt Romney action figure, it would look like the pre-debate Mitt Romney action figure. All the post-debate Romney does is say both “yes” and “no” at the same time to the benefit of none – save Mitt Romney.

Republicans are willing to overlook all this in the cause of getting Obama out of office. But I strongly suspect, should Romney win, Democrats will have to jostle to get into line when the complains start rolling in. Because when Republicans vote for Mitt Romney, they are buying a pig in a poke. They think they’re getting an anti-Obama, but what they need to remember is the fact that when they vote for Romney, they are voting for the man who invented the Obamacare they hate so much.

A new tool was applied to social media following the presidential debate, and it showed that public sentiment was Obama won on substance, whereas Romney appeared to win by lying. The ability of social media to spread the word about fact-checks has changed the game.

NBC used a tool called ForSight, used to gauge public opinion in new media, to conclude that by Friday there was a sustained social media backlash against the punditry calling the Denver presidential debate for Romney. The new meme was that if Romney “won”, he did so by lying, whereas Obama had won on substance.

The immediate consensus that Mitt Romney won Wednesday’s presidential debate has eroded significantly as fact-checkers have weighed in and supporters of President Barack Obama have fought back, according to NBCPolitics’ computer-assisted analysis of more than 1.3 million post-debate comments on social media.

The analysis suggests that as debate over a news event continues unmediated over time, the impact of the conventional wisdom of journalists and partisan commentators can be mitigated…

By Friday morning, the counterargument that Obama had actually won on substance had taken root, with online sentiment now favoring the president.

I am not presenting these revelations to argue that Obama won the debate. It was established by the media that Romney won the debate, even if this study — based upon the post mortem fact-checking that damaged Romney’s “win” — says otherwise. Romney has also gotten a small bounce in post debate polls so far among undecideds.

However, to the point of the social media backlash, the debate bounce is not a shift in the electorate precisely for the reasons people were citing on social media; the public does not find Romney trustworthy or presidential. According to numbers from a Reuters/Ipsos survey released Saturday, the bounce is not a shift in the electorate, but a short term bounce. “We haven’t seen additional gains from Romney. This suggests to me that this is more of a bounce than a permanent shift,” Ipsos pollster Julia Clark concluded.

Furthermore, Obama gained ground post debate on matters of character and who understands the electorate more, even among voters who thought Romney “won” the debate. Obama is still more liked than Romney (53-29), and he still has a slim overall lead over Romney. Voters feel Obama has right values needed for a President by 43 to 37. Ironically given the narrative that came out of Denver’s debate, Obama still leads 42-38 on who is “tough” enough to be President.

So, Romney “won” the debate but did nothing he needed to do in order to present himself as more presidential. Worse, our media gave a debate to the person who by all fact-checkers’ accounts, lied his way through the entire debate to such an astonishing degree that there were times we did not know who was standing on that stage. This was not the Mitt Romney who has been campaigning for the past six years. Mitt Romney “won” by disavowing himself of Mitt Romney. How is that a real “win”? Perhaps he won the debate only to lose himself.

Not bothered in the least by Romney stabbing Republican ideology in the back in order to present himself as Obama lite during Denver’s debate, the Romney camp were out with champagne and snarls the day after the debate — high on their first “win” in a long and rather embarrassing campaign season for them. Republicans took to the airwaves to gloat like frat boys, demonstrating the very reason why they should not be in charge of anything. Ambition happily sacrificed principles in the Romney camp.

If this is “winning”, then we need to redefine the purpose of these debates. Ostensibly, they exist to inform the people. How exactly did Mitt Romney inform the people of his policy positions so that they were better equipped to vote their conscience? He misled them, if anything, and he seemed to only confirm voters’ already dim opinions of his character. The media dropped the ball on this one, including the allegedly liberal media.

Things are so bad in our corporate media that we were told a liar won a debate for the Presidency because the other guy didn’t hit him back hard enough. These folks are paid for their ability to see past the trees, even if they are the right height, and focus on more than political theater.

The debate is supposed to be about who is best suited to be President, not about who won the WWE show, unless the media is conceding that our presidential debates are nothing but entertainment not subject to rules. The Denver debate and the post debate coverage was an unmitigated fail.

Just like the trolled Town Halls of 2010, the media got punked by manic hysteria and distortions meant to distract from the very issues at hand. The media did nothing to clear the air. But citizens took to social media to point through the crazed haze, revealing the little man behind the curtain of lies.

Romney won the debate, but failed to achieve what should have been his biggest goals; to change public perception of him and to come off as presidential.

“It’s not easy to debate a liar,” complained an email from one observer of the first presidential debate – and there was no question about which candidate he meant. Prevarication, falsification, fabrication are all familiar tactics that have been employed by Mitt Romney without much consequence to him ever since he entered public life, thanks to the inviolable taboo in the mainstream media against calling out a liar (unless, of course, he lies about sex).

Yes, President Obama ought to have been better prepared for Romney’s barrage of blather and bull. The Republican’s own chief advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, had glibly described the “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy they would deploy in the general election, to make swing voters forget the “severe conservative” of the primaries. Romney executed that pivot on Wednesday night, but he could do so only by spouting literally dozens of provably fraudulent assertions — which various diligent fact-checkers proceeded to debunk.

Knowing that he is vulnerable on taxation and the budget for many reasons, including his own peculiar and secretive tax history, Romney made several contradictory claims regarding his economic plan. He has no plan to lavish $5 trillion in tax breaks on the wealthy. He won’t cut taxes for the rich at all. He vowed to provide tax relief to the middle class and won’t increase their tax burden. He swore that his tax cuts would not increase the deficit.

Finally, he said that with all of that, he would grow the economy enough to shrink and eventually eliminate the deficit — without raising taxes on anyone. And he claimed that there are several studies proving he can fulfill all of these conflicting promises — even though he refuses to provide any specific tax proposals beyond a broad tax cut.

There is no study proving that Romney can do what he promised – and among his lies is his description of editorials in Tthe Wall Street Journal as “studies” of his plan. The most complete and unrefuted study of his claims remains the Tax Policy Center’s bipartisan report on the Romney plan, which shows that there is simply no way to pay for his $5 trillion, across-the-board tax cut without raising taxes on the middle class. None of the alternative studies he has cited proves otherwise – and some of them actually amass additional evidence that he is wrong.

Undoubtedly he knows all that. He knows that eliminating the estate tax, a mainstay of his plan, will benefit the rich enormously and almost nobody else.

He also knows that when he claims economic growth alone will erase the deficit, without raising taxes, he is inventing impossible numbers. As The National Memo’s Howard Hill demonstrated yesterday, the assumptions behind his claims are ridiculous. For the numbers to work, he would have to create not 12 million jobs, as he promised to do by 2016, but 162 million — more than the total current U.S. workforce. Or else the jobs created would have to pay more than $443,000 per year on average — which is even less likely than Rafalca winning the dressage medal at the next Summer Olympics.

At the same time, Romney accused the president of increasing the federal debt by an amount that is “almost as much…as all prior presidents combined.” This charge, which he leveled before, is patently false and by now Romney must know it. The prior debt, mostly run up by George W. Bush and his Republican congressional cronies, stood above $10 trillion when Obama took office. The debt is now just over $16 trillion, mostly due to costs incurred by Bush and by Obama’s successful effort to prevent a Depression.

Having essentially disavowed the health care reforms that were his sole significant achievement in his single term in elected office, the former Massachusetts Governor suddenly claimed ownership of Romneycare. Presumably, this will make him more appealing to swing voters, too. But he still wants to do away with Obamacare, except for the parts that are popular.

For this maneuver, he must misrepresent his own proposed federal health care overhaul. He says there will be no change to Medicare for current beneficiaries, but repealing the Affordable Care Act will deprive them of free preventive care, increase their costs for prescription drugs, and do irreparable harm to Medicaid, which provides assisted care for nine million destitute Medicare patients.

But Romney has been lying about the Affordable Care Act for years, according to his own former advisor Jonathan Gruber, the chief intellectual architect of Romneycare. Nearly a year ago, Gruber complained that Romney’s attempt to draw a sharp distinction between the Massachusetts legislation and Obamacare was phony. He told Capital New York in November 2011 that “they’re the same fucking bill. He just can’t have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it’s the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he’s just lying.”

Lying again? Indeed, the falsehoods flowed on every conceivable subject. Concerning energy, Romney claimed that “about half” of the renewable energy firms that received federal assistance under Obama administration programs went bankrupt — a claim that cannot be justified by any measure. Of the 28 firms that got federal loans or loan guarantees, three went under, representing under 11 percent — and less than 5 percent of the funds committed. (This assertion was so blatantly untrue that the Romney campaign withdrew it the next day.)

The examples cited above hardly exhaust the deep well of dishonesty in the Republican campaign. What Romney has done presents a fundamental challenge to the American political media. Will news outlets hold him accountable for baldly misleading voters? Are they capable of confronting his continuous mendacity with basic facts? Some have made a beginning, while others have scarcely tried. If that isn’t their responsibility, then they no longer have any purpose at all.

The Obama campaign described the ad, “Whether he was talking about taxes, healthcare, or almost anything else, Mitt Romney didn’t tell the truth in the first presidential debate. He denied the very existence of his $5 trillion tax plan weighted toward the wealthy and made dishonest statements about his plan for people with pre-existing medical conditions. Maybe that’s because his real plans would mean devastating consequences for the middle-class, like raising taxes on them in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. With so much at stake, America needs a president with character, not a politician who just plays one.”

Obama is a thoughtful man, a person of substance and character. He didn’t treat the debate like a boxing match, and pundits say he lost because of it. I’m not so sure that’s true. I suppose it’s how we define win. Is winning a debate beating up your opponent with lies, or is winning a debate taking your case to the people?

Mitt Romney has been branded fairly with the stamp of dishonesty by virtue of the first debate alone. And he was clearly playing a character, as he abandoned almost his entire platform from the past year in the debate. What did we learn about Mitt Romney in the debate? Only that once again, he wasn’t being straight with us.

The Denver fallout continues for Mitt Romney. Sunday, the AP said that Mitt Romney might need a crash course in diplomacy 101 if he gets elected.

During the first presidential debate, Romney attempted to conflate Spain with Obama in order to smear the President with failure no matter how unrelated. The irony of this is that not only did he irritate Spain (a Romney specialty, it seems), but also he got it wrong.

In fact, Spain’s problems come precisely from the kind of “leadership” we would expect under Romney; the kind of leadership America had under Bush that led to the great recession.

Spain is none-too-pleased. Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria called out Romney’s “ignorance” of reality (are we cringing yet?), “What I see is ignorance of what is reality, but especially of the potential of the Spanish economy.”

Additional Spanish leaders piled on, managing to demonstrate more diplomacy than Mitt Romney has shown in this entire campaign:

Maria Dolores Cospedal, leader of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party, noted that “Spain is not on fire from all sides like some on the outside have suggested.” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo called it “very unfortunate that other countries should be put up as examples” when the facts are skewed.

During the Denver debate, Romney argued that government spending was the root of Spain’s problems, and fear-mongered that because of this faulty premise, America would face the same path under Obama (again ignoring that Republicans drove Clinton’s surplus into a record deficit and told us deficits don’t matter as they did it). Romney said, “I don’t want to go down the path of Spain. I want to go down the path of growth that puts Americans to work.”

Spain’s level of government spending is low compared to the rest of Europe. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Spain ran budget surpluses in the years from 2005-2007. Its debt to GDP ratio fell from 50.3 percent in 2000 to 26.5 percent of GDP in 2007. There is no remotely plausibly story of government profligacy here.”

What did cause the problems? The same thing that happened here in America – the greed of the private sector bankers fueling a housing bubble, and now those same bankers refuse to loan money thereby killing the credit that spurs the economy.

Center for Economic and Policy Research reported on the ideologically driven misunderstanding of the crisis in Spain being used by the American Right wing to justify cutting social spending when it is actually not related to social spending (emphasis mine):

In short, people who describe the euro zone crisis as a story of excessive government deficits are pushing an ideological agenda that has nothing to do with reality. The story of the current deficits of the non-Greece countries is the story of the collapse of housing bubbles that threw the euro zone economies into a severe downturn. The European Central Bank (ECB) has magnified the problem by maintaining relatively tight monetary policy in order to maintain very low inflation and also explicitly asserting that it would not act as a lender of last resort to the heavily indebted countries.

Blaming government profligacy may be useful to those who want to see cuts in social spending, but it is not a story that is based in reality. It conceals the incompetence/greed of the private sector bankers who fueled the bubble. It also ignores the recklessness of the ECB of clinging to its inflation obsession even in the midst of a crisis that threatens the survival of the euro and could cause millions of additional workers to lose their job.

If Romney wants to put Americans to work then why is Romney advocating for the same policies that threaten to put millions of additional workers out of a job in Spain?

Romney’s showing at the debate “put Europe on edge”. Embarrassingly for the U.S., the Romney international affairs circus is just getting warmed up. Monday, Romney makes a foreign policy speech, in which no doubt he will attempt to paint himself as Reagan and tell Obama to tear down some wall. I have ten thousand on Romney managing to insult an ally or give yet another nation an excuse to refuse to cooperate with the US as he did with Russia.

So far, Romney has managed to insult, offend and/or deeply concern Australia, Russia, Palestine, Britain, and Spain. All of Europe is on “edge” with Romney, including the center-right and conservative governments. Romney was accused of putting our national security at risk during his summer of foreign affairs woes. The British suggested that Romney take diplomacy lessons from Michelle Obama during his gaffe ridden visit, and now the AP is suggesting that he might need lessons in diplomacy. The AP.

When the AP is calling out a Republican neo-con corporatist, things might be worse than they appear. I don’t recall the main stream press warning us about Bush’s lack of diplomacy, and we all know how he governed. I daresay it’s not just Europe that’s on edge over the possibility of a Romney presidency.

He irritated Britons and Palestinians during a summer tour abroad and has declared Russia to be America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe. Just last week, the Republican candidate, who plans a foreign policy speech Monday, raised eyebrows in Spain by holding it up as a prime example of government spending run amok.

That left Spaniards confused, and threatened to reinforce Romney’s perceived handicap in international affairs, precisely at a time when lingering questions over the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, has President Barack Obama on the defensive.

“I don’t want to go down the path of Spain,” Romney said Wednesday night during the first presidential debate. He argued that government spending under Obama has reached 42 percent of the U.S. economy, a figure comparable with America’s NATO ally. “I want to go down the path of growth that puts Americans to work.”

The remark was Romney’s latest to cause international offense during a campaign that much of the world is closely monitoring.

The sensitivity reflects a wide understanding that Romney could prevail over President Barack Obama and take over as leader of the world’s top military, economic and diplomatic power. If Romney becomes commander in chief, he could face a testy beginning with Europe’s economic laggards such as Greece, Italy and Spain, whom he has beaten up regularly throughout the campaign.

No one contests that Spain’s situation is dire, its economy in deep recession and unemployment hovering around 25 percent. But Spain’s level of government spending is actually low by European standards, and significantly less than Germany and Scandinavian countries with far healthier economic prospects. Spain’s woes were chiefly caused by the collapse of a property bubble that had fueled more than a decade of booming economic growth.

Spanish reaction to Romney was swift.

“What I see is ignorance of what is reality, but especially of the potential of the Spanish economy,” said Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria.

Maria Dolores Cospedal, leader of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party, noted that “Spain is not on fire from all sides like some on the outside have suggested.” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo called it “very unfortunate that other countries should be put up as examples” when the facts are skewed.

The criticism comes at an inopportune time for Romney. Obama has consistently outscored his challenger in polls asking about national security leadership, but the administration is struggling to deal with last month’s attack on the consulate. Four Americans died, including the first ambassador killed in the line of duty in more than three decades.

Romney will have a chance to fully articulate his vision of America’s role in world affairs when gives his address Monday at the Virginia Military Institute. But the furor in Spain, however minor, instead serves as a reminder of Romney’s record of diplomatic stumbles, such as calling Russia — not Iran or China, for example — America’s primary global adversary in March.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has since pointed to Romney’s comment as justification for Russia’s opposition to America’s missile defense plans in Europe, saying the statement has “strengthened Russia’s positions in talks on this important and sensitive subject.”

Then on a July trip to Europe and Israel meant to burnish Romney’s foreign policy credentials, the candidate criticized Britain over its preparations for the London Olympic Games. The comment baffled America’s closest ally, drawing withering retorts from the British press, the Conservative prime minister and London’s right-wing mayor. He also cited a private meeting with Britain’s spy service MI6, in a significant breach of protocol.

In Israel, he followed up by declaring Jerusalem the capital of the Jewish state, which U.S. administrations have refused to accept for decades given Palestinian claims to the ancient city.

At a gathering of mostly American Jewish donors, Romney implied that Israel was more advanced than the Palestinians because of cultural superiority. The comment drew a charge of racism from the Palestinians’ chief peace negotiator, with whom the U.S. has been working to reach a two-state peace deal with Israel and counter the threat posed by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rejects Israel’s existence.

The comments in some ways reflect the demands of a presidential campaign and the thousands of speeches, fundraisers and public appearances each candidate must make.

Obama, too, has made mistakes. He was forced to apologize to Poland’s president in June after using the expression “Polish death camp” in reference to an extermination center operated by Nazi Germany on Polish soil during World War II.

Romney’s Spain quip might play well with Americans closely split on the election, who’ve heard from both candidates about the perils of economic contagion from Europe’s debt crisis. It also was meant as a reminder of the $16 trillion U.S. debt that Obama presides over.

But even if it barely registered in a debate that most observers credited Romney with winning, the comparison may do damage. By singling out Spain, Romney ruffled feathers in a country he will probably need to call on for assistance if he becomes president. Spain has almost 1,500 troops in Afghanistan. It contributed fighter jets, refueling planes and naval vessels to the U.S.-led NATO mission that ousted Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi from power.

“When you have a party or politician that has not been in power nationally for a while, there is a learning curve,” said Frances G. Burwell, director of transatlantic relations at the Atlantic Council. “Europe has changed rapidly in terms of its governance rapidly. It’s a very diverse place. But I’m sure a Romney administration would quickly get up to speed on this.”

Burwell didn’t see Romney’s slighting of Spain or other European countries significantly straining ties or complicating tough questions on the horizon for any U.S. president, such as troop deployments in Afghanistan. But she said his critique of Spain’s government spending level was somewhat strange considering the Madrid government is assertively cutting expenditures to avoid a European bailout and the high levels of American debt.

Added Heather Conley, European director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Europeans ask the U.S., ‘What about you?’ This isn’t helpful to either side of the transatlantic relationship.”

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's lackluster performance in the first U.S. election debate provoked uneasiness in European capitals on Thursday, where hopes are mostly, if unofficially, pinned on his securing a second term.

While a lot can change before the November 6 vote, and Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney will go head to head twice more before then, polling conducted immediately after the debate showed Romney came out overwhelmingly on top.

In Europe, where leaders and finance officials have worked closely with the Obama administration over the past 2-1/2 years trying to resolve the euro area debt crisis, there was particular consternation at Romney's singling out of deficit-ridden Spain as a poorly administered economy.

"Romney is making analogies that aren't based on reality," Foreign Affairs Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo told reporters after a meeting of his centre-right party.

Leading Spanish daily El Pais highlighted the fact that Spain was the only European country mentioned, and contrasted Romney's negative depiction of it with Obama's praise for Spain's renewable energy policies during the 2008 campaign.

"Spain has never been mentioned in a presidential debate as a symbol of failure," the left-leaning newspaper lamented. "What happened last night makes history. And not in a good way."

Political commentators in France and Germany registered surprise at Obama's underwhelming performance, saying the election could be much tighter as a result.

"Obama showed a lack of desire to be president, which could put him on shaky ground as a presidential candidate," said liberal German news magazine Der Spiegel.

"It's now clear that to get back into the White House the U.S. president needs running shoes, not flip-flops."

France's Le Monde appeared equally surprised by Obama's sub-par performance. "Where did the favorite go?" it asked on its front page, with a headline below saying: "Obama fails his first televised debate against an incisive Romney."

LEANING OBAMA'S WAY

In private, many EU diplomats have no qualms about saying they want Obama re-elected; it is no secret that many European countries, whether led by centre-left or centre-right governments, are more broadly aligned with the Democrats when it comes to social and tax policy, the environment and a range of foreign-affairs issues.

That is something Obama has sought to exploit in the past. In the run-up to a G8 meeting at Camp David in May, White House officials firmly pressed their European counterparts to rally behind Obama's policy initiatives, according to those involved.

"It was like all of the G8 apart from Russia and Japan were expected to be part of the Obama re-election campaign," the chief of staff of one European leader told Reuters at the time.

Washington has also applied quiet pressure on Europe in recent months about the need to avoid a major blow-up in the debt crisis ahead of the election, in part so as not to rattle the U.S. economy, several EU officials have told Reuters.

Europe's leaders have good reason to go along; they want to keep a politically risky crisis under wraps, too, and they want to expand the close working relationship they have developed with Obama's administration over the past four years.

"The Europeans have a general uneasiness about a Romney presidency," said Jan Techau, the director of Carnegie Europe.

"It's not because they don't like him, but there are a lot of neoconservative policy advisers who would come back into office under a Romney presidency, and that is a prospect that a lot of European leaders are not comfortable with.

"There's a general tendency to stick to what you know and what you have been working with," he told Reuters.

"DEAL WITH IT"

Romney has also not done much to endear himself to the Old World. During a visit to Britain ahead of the Olympics in July he cast doubt on how well prepared London was to host the games, and in Israel days later he appeared to criticise Palestinian culture, leading to widespread condemnation.

One of Romney's advisers on a "Europe working group" is Nile Gardiner, a Briton who was an aide to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

In an opinion piece in the Washington Times last month, Gardiner was decidedly downbeat on Europe, saying the continent was in terminal decline and European integration was misguided.

"The European Project is falling apart, drowning in a sea of debt, and driven by bureaucrats in Brussels who lack any semblance of democratic accountability," he wrote.

Those sorts of opinions among the circle around Romney have raised hackles in Europe and fuelled hopes that his challenge for the White House will fail.

Obama still holds an advantage in opinion polls, including a daily Reuters/IPSOS tracking poll that gives him a 47 percent to 41 percent lead over Romney, a margin that has held fairly steady since mid-September.

With just 33 days before the election, Romney still has a hill to climb to unseat Obama, but two more strong performances in the debates could tip undecided voters his way.

In Europe, leaders are watching closely and will be ready to suppress their Romney reservations if need be.

"Even though we have a natural predilection for Democratic presidents, we'll embrace the next U.S. president whoever he is," said one diplomat in Brussels. "We just have to deal with it."

(Additional reporting by Michelle Martin in Berlin, Fiona Ortiz in Madrid and Alexandria Sage in Paris; Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Will Waterman)

Republicans Sell America’s Sovereignty and Give in to a Foreign Corporation’s Demands

By: RmuseOctober 8th, 2012

As a sovereign nation, America’s government has supremacy of authority to rule as dictated by the U.S. Constitution and is completely independent from outside forces. The Founding Fathers never intended for foreigners to influence the government or impose their will on Americans or politicians, but for the past two years, Republicans have acquiesced to a foreign corporation’s demand they be given the authority to raise gas prices, endanger the water supply, and impede farmers right to produce crops to feed the nation. Now, Willard Romney has joined the fray and Americans should begin asking why Romney promises to allow a Canadian corporation to control land in America, and why they are funding his run for the White House.

It is obvious to many Americans that Romney and Republicans hate this government and its people, and in their drive to weaken America, they are promoting a Canadian corporation to assist in their efforts. It was revealed recently that a Canadian corporation contributed $1 million to put Willard Romney in the White House, and he supports another Canadian corporation’s expedition to takeover Americans’ lands and raise gas prices. At one point in America’s history, it was illegal for foreigners to impact elections and influence the government, but that was before Republicans abandoned their duty to serve the Constitution and the American people.

The two Canadian corporations attempting to influence the government of the United States are TransCanada and investment management giant, Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited. Maybe Romney believes that as president, ceding control of Americans’ private property to a Canadian oil corporation is acceptable because they have oil, and it is possible he accepted a million dollars from a Canadian investment firm because of his affinity for vulture capitalism, but whatever his logic, Romney and Republicans are traitors for giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the people.

The investment and insurance giant, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., contributed $1 million to a Romney super-PAC in spite of the law that says that any foreign national is prohibited from “directly or indirectly” contributing money to influence US elections. The Canadian investment firm donated to Romney because “a victory by Gov. Romney in November would be beneficial and level the playing field against corporations in more favorable tax jurisdictions.” Apparently, if the investment firm can buy Romney’s assistance to change tax laws for a Canadian corporation, then an illegal million dollar donation is a small price to pay. Romney is notorious for using other people’s money to increase his wealth, so accepting an illegal campaign contribution fits his penchant for corruption, however, it is Romney and Republican’s aid to TransCanada Corporation that is impacting America’s farmers, the water supply, and the price of gasoline.

TransCanada Corporation is the owner-operator of the Keystone XL pipeline that Romney promises to approve on his first day in office to supply oil to China. In a campaign speech in Michigan, Romney told supporters “I’ll get us that oil from Canada we deserve,” but he knows the oil is slated for export on the foreign market and that Americans will never see one drop; except when the pipeline ruptures. Romney, Paul Ryan, and Republicans lied to the American people that expediting construction of the pipeline from Canada to Texas will create jobs and provide a glut of gasoline for Americans, but TransCanada debunked job creation claims and guaranteed the pipeline will increase the price of gas at the pump by at least 15 cents per gallon if not more. The environmental impact will be substantially more costly though, but decimating America’s natural resources has never been a concern for conservatives. For the record, the tar sand belongs to Canada and Speaker of the House John Boehner, and subsequently they have already contracted to export the refined gas to China. However, before the northern route has even been decided, TransCanada has taken over farmers’ land throughout Texas and prompted local officials to protestors even on their own land. Republicans trumpet personal freedom and decry intervention in private citizens’ lives, but where oil, wealth, and power are involved, freedom rests in the hands of a Canadian corporation.

On Thursday, actress Daryl Hannah was arrested for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas, but real victim was a 78 year-old grandmother, Eleanor Fairchild, who was arrested with Hannah. A spokesman for the Canadian corporation said, “It is unfortunate Ms. Hannah and other out-of-state activists have chosen to break the law by illegally trespassing on private property,” but the Texas grandmother was not an out-of-state activist; she owned the private property TransCanada claimed she was trespassing on. Fairchild is not alone in protecting her private property. Across Texas, and states where the pipeline is planned or already under construction, farmers are protesting KeystoneXL cutting through their land, and their common complaint is, “they’re siting it across me,” and not “across my land,” because farmers “identify with their land like they identify with their own bodies.”

It is common knowledge Romney is not concerned about the American people, and that his first allegiance is to corporations and Wall Street, but he is giving clear indications he will allow foreigners to dictate their policies that will affect this government and its people. His company, Bain Capital, invested in Chinese companies, Iran, and a firm that acknowledged its strategy was profiting from US companies outsourcing jobs, and it begs the question; does Romney intend to serve the American people or foreign corporations, or in the case of Israel, a foreign government?

The Romney campaign asserts President Obama is foreign to America, but they are projecting Romney and his devotion to serving foreigners. That his campaign accepted a million dollars from a Canadian investment firm, or that he promotes a Canadian company that is taking over Americans’ land proves he is not devoted to America, but to whichever foreign entity supports his campaign. Romney pledged to give TransCanada free rein to build the Keystone pipeline, and it has already resulted in the arrest of a Texas grandmother and Native Americans for standing on their own land, and construction of the Northern portion of the pipeline assures that more American farmers will lose their property rights to a foreign corporation to enrich the oil industry that contributes heavily to Romney’s campaign.

The American people should be mortified that when it comes to protecting Americans’ freedom as private property owners, Romney’s promise to approve the Keystone XL pipeline informs his intent of defending foreign entities; not Americans. In fact, if Romney believes a Canadian investment firm and tar sand corporation will increase his wealth and power, he will defer to them regardless if they arrest Americans on their own private property or raise the price of gas, and it defines him as the only foreigner running for president.

Even with his strong debate performance, Mitt Romney needs every possible advantage to overtake President Barack Obama in the next four weeks. Not helping him much is the Republican Party he leads.

By CHARLES BABINGTONAssociated Press

SALISBURY, N.C. —

Even with his strong debate performance, Mitt Romney needs every possible advantage to overtake President Barack Obama in the next four weeks. Not helping him much is the Republican Party he leads.

Thanks in part to congressional Republicans' no-compromise stands on key issues, and an unpopular past president in George W. Bush, the GOP's image is at one of its lowest points in modern times. Romney is now distancing himself a bit from some party policies, most notably by emphasizing that he doesn't want to cut taxes for high earners.

When talking with unaffiliated voters, "it's more important to sell Romney" than Republican policies, said Jordan McSwain, 19, who makes about 800 phone calls a week for GOP candidates from the central North Carolina town of Salisbury. A lot of undecided voters tell him "the Republicans have stopped all work in Washington," McSwain said, although he reminds them that Democrats controlled Congress for Obama's first two years.

Ten months ago, Americans were fuming over a near crisis in the economy triggered by Congress' partisan showdown over raising the debt ceiling and keeping the government operating. A Pew Research poll found that considerably more adults thought the Republican Party was "more extreme in its positions" than the Democratic Party. They saw the GOP as less ethical and less willing to work with the other party. And more Americans blamed Republican leaders for Congress' paltry list of accomplishments.

Recent polls spell out the Republican Party's challenge. A CBS-New York Times poll last month found that 49 percent of adults had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, and 36 percent unfavorable. The GOP was upside down on the question, with 43 percent viewing it favorably, and 55 percent unfavorably.

This is partly because more Americans see themselves as Democrats. The latest AP-GfK poll found that 31 percent of adults considered themselves Democrats, 22 percent Republicans and 29 percent independents. When unaffiliated voters were pressed to say which way they lean, the results were 50 percent Democrat and 37 percent Republican.

The Democratic Party's favorable ratings are nothing to brag about. But party identification is less important to Obama, who has a four-year record for voters to judge. Romney, being less well known, must rely at least in part on the "Republican brand."

"The Republican brand name is in terrible shape, and people are not naturally sympathetic to the Republicans in Congress," Fox News commentator Brit Hume said in June.

Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, speaking in February of the rambunctious GOP primary, said, "This process has certainly hurt all the Republican candidates, and diminished the brand, unfortunately."

Romney's hopes may rest, at least somewhat, on distancing himself from the brand's less popular parts, while sacrificing as little fundraising and enthusiasm from the base as possible. The less popular parts, in some voters' eyes, include the uncompromising stand that many tea party-leaning Republicans have taken in Congress, especially on tax and spending issues.

In recent days, Romney has said he does not want to reduce the overall tax burden for high-income families, even though he still calls for a 20 percent cut in all federal income tax rates. He says changes in tax deductions would keep Americans' overall tax burden about the same. But he has not detailed how he can accomplish both goals.

Polls show significant support for Obama's call to increase taxes on households making more than $250,000 a year.

Romney's new emphasis on a no-net-decrease tax policy puts him at odds with many congressional Republicans, who say tax cuts for high earners will spur job growth.

The move delights GOP commentators such as David Brooks. During the presidential primaries, "the GOP did its best to appear unattractive," Brooks wrote last week in The New York Times. In Wednesday's debate with Obama, he wrote: "Romney did something no other mainstream Republican has had the guts to do. Either out of conviction or political desperation, he broke with tea party orthodoxy and began to redefine the Republican identity."

Brian Nick, a Republican consultant based in Charlotte, said neither party "has a good brand right now," because Washington's constant partisan quarreling has given politics in general a bad name. He said, however, that Democrats have sometimes benefitted in competitive states by painting all Republicans as being more interested in party purity than in solving problems.

"Democrats do use the tea party label to attack Republicans and try to tie them to a strict orthodoxy," Nick said.

Further hurting the Republican brand is the status of each party's most recent former president. Only one-fourth of Americans had a favorable view of Bush when his presidency ended, according to Gallup. His standing has improved somewhat since then, but he lags far behind former President Bill Clinton. A recent Bloomberg News poll found that nearly 2 in 3 Americans favorably view the former Democratic president.

Ron Thomas, 26, is an independent voter with a fairly dim view of the national Republican Party.

"Who will help the working man more? It's definitely Barack," said Thomas, who works for a rental car company in Charlotte.

Thomas, who endured a chilly drizzle this week to discuss politics, has few problems with Republicans at the state level. In fact, he supports Republican Pat McCrory in the governor's race, saying the former Charlotte mayor is good on urban issues.

But Thomas said Romney turned him off with his claim that the 47 percent of Americans who don't owe federal income taxes will not take responsibility for their lives.

"I'm part of that 47 percent," Thomas said. "I have a college degree, and I work two jobs," he said, but it's still a struggle.

**************

Originally published Tuesday, October 9, 2012 at 12:06 AM

Big gaps in Romney plan on pre-existing conditions

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he has a plan to help people with pre-existing medical conditions get health insurance. But there's a huge catch: You basically have to be covered in the first place.

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVARAssociated Press

WASHINGTON —

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he has a plan to help people with pre-existing medical conditions get health insurance. But there's a huge catch: You basically have to be covered in the first place.

If you had a significant break in health insurance coverage an insurer still could delve into your medical history, looking for anything - from a bad back to high blood pressure - that could foreshadow future claims. They'd be able to turn you down.

That's a contrast to President Barack Obama's health care law, which guarantees that people in poor health can get comprehensive coverage at the same rates everybody else pays, and provides government subsidies to help low- to middle-income households pay premiums.

Starting Jan. 1, 2014, an insurer "may not impose any pre-existing condition exclusion," the law says.

Romney mentioned his pre-existing conditions plan during last week's presidential debate. "I do have a plan that deals with people with pre-existing conditions," he said.

His campaign has not spelled out details other than it would help people who have maintained continuous coverage. That involves making incremental changes to insurance laws and regulations, and may or may not whittle down the number of uninsured.

"It will solve some of the problems," said health economist Gail Wilensky, a longtime adviser to Republicans. "It won't solve the problem of people having gone for a long time without health insurance."

Since losing health insurance is often connected to major life upheavals like job loss or divorce, many people aren't able to keep up continuous coverage. More than 70 percent of the uninsured have been without coverage for a year or longer, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Obama's answer - it's the law of the land unless repealed - is more like hitting the reset button. About 30 million uninsured people would gain coverage as the U.S. moves closer to other economically advanced countries that provide health care for all citizens.

The differences between the Obama and Romney approaches reflect a fundamental disagreement about the role of government in dealing with the nation's health care woes: high costs, uneven quality, widespread waste and nearly 49 million uninsured.

Republicans are looking for private-sector solutions that government can encourage. Under Obama, government has taken the wheel, framing a grand bargain in which insurance companies will have to accept all applicants in exchange for a requirement that virtually all Americans carry coverage.

About 13 percent of people age 64 and younger who apply for an individual policy are turned away for medical reasons, according to insurance industry statistics. In 2008, that was more than 220,000 individuals. The denial rate rises to nearly 25 percent for people age 50 to 64.

While Republicans are united in their desire to repeal Obama's law, there is no consensus within the party on how or whether to replace it.

Romney has been stressing his pre-existing conditions plan as he works to soften his public image in the homestretch of a campaign that appears to have tightened since last week's debate with Obama. Yet his campaign has only provided a bare-bones set of talking points.

Romney himself addressed the issue in a recent column for The New England Journal of Medicine. "Regulation must prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage."

Most people already enjoy such protection under a 1996 law signed by President Bill Clinton. It works fairly seamlessly for people who switch from one job-based plan to another.

It's harder for people switching from job-based coverage to an individual plan. They first have to exhaust a coverage option known as COBRA, which allows people with job-based insurance to keep their health plan for up to 18 months after leaving the company, provided they pay the full premium. Many can't afford that.

And there's no federal protection against being turned down for people trying to switch from one individual plan to another.

Romney could address those two gaps, making it easier for people to switch from job-based to individual coverage and among individual plans. His campaign has not specified how.

In his journal article, Romney also proposed to allow people purchasing coverage individually to deduct the cost from their income taxes, and he expressed support for purchasing pools and for allowing insurers to sell across state lines. His campaign says states will have the flexibility and resources to design programs for residents who cannot afford coverage on their own.

Individual insurance market expert Karen Pollitz, who served in the Obama administration as a consumer regulator, says the components of Romney's plan are unlikely to provide as comprehensive a guarantee as the president's Affordable Care Act.

"The ACA just says insurance companies can't discriminate against you, period," said Pollitz, now with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. "If you've been uninsured, you can come into this market on Jan. 1, 2014, no questions asked."

*************---Fact check: Romney's one-sided story on defense and trade

Mitt Romney blamed President Obama solely Monday for potential defense cuts that Republicans in Congress agreed to, and left the misimpression that Obama has ignored free-trade initiatives.

A closer look at some of the Republican presidential nominee's statements in his foreign-policy speech:

MITT ROMNEY: "I will roll back President Obama's deep and arbitrary cuts to our national defense that would devastate our military."

THE FACTS: "Arbitrary" defense cuts do not belong to Obama alone but also to congressional Republicans, including Romney's vice-presidential running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan. The first round of cuts in projected defense spending comes from a bipartisan deal in August 2011 between Congress and the White House. Unless a new budget deal is reached in time, additional spending cuts will begin in January across government, and the cost to the Pentagon would be $500 billion over a decade. The Pentagon's budget, including war costs, is $670 billion this year, or about 18 percent of total federal spending. Even setting aside the costs of the wars, military spending has more than doubled since 2001.

ROMNEY: "The president has not signed one new free-trade agreement in the past four years."

THE FACTS: Obama hasn't opened new trade negotiations, but after taking office, he revived a free-trade deal with Colombia that had been negotiated by his Republican predecessor but left to languish and sought similar progress with South Korean and Panamanian free-trade pacts.

ROMNEY: "I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel."

THE FACTS: Romney apparently has moved toward the balance enshrined in U.S. policy from one administration to another on the question of Israelis and Palestinians and away from his provocative remarks to a May fundraiser when he said "the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace," "the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish," Palestinians are "committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel" and it would be "the worst idea in the world" to put pressure on the Israelis to give up something in hopes Palestinians would respond accordingly.

ROMNEY: "As the dust settles, as the murdered (in the Libya consulate attack) are buried, Americans are asking how this happened, how the threats we face have grown so much worse, and what this calls on America to do."

THE FACTS: It's unclear whether terrorism has gotten worse. There has been no incident even remotely comparable in scope or symbolic meaning to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Assailants stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and there has been an uptick in attacks on American troops by supposedly friendly Afghan forces. But many counterterrorist experts say al-Qaida has been weakened and the threats of global terrorism better countered over the past decade.

ROMNEY: "When we look at the Middle East today — with Iran closer than ever to nuclear-weapons capability, with the conflict in Syria threatening to destabilize the region, with violent extremists on the march and with an American ambassador and three others dead likely at the hands of al-Qaida affiliates — it is clear that the risk of conflict in the region is higher now than when the president took office."

THE FACTS: Obama entered office in 2009 with the United States still engaged in a conflict in Iraq. U.S. troops are no longer there. Israel and Hamas had just finished a three-week war. That was two years after another war between Israel and an Iranian-backed force, in that case, Hezbollah in Lebanon. There has been no significant Israeli military conflict since Obama has come into office. However, Syria's conflict has become the region's deadliest since the Iraq war. The United States has stayed out of that conflict under Obama.

The Associated Press

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Pro-Romney energy company accused of extorting contributions from workers

By Eric W. DolanMonday, October 8, 2012 17:27 EDT

The Ohio Democratic Party on Monday formally requested that the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio launch an investigation of Murray Energy, which has been accused of forcing its employees to make political contributions to Republican candidates.

“I write to formally request a criminal investigation concerning a recent report suggesting the Murray Energy Corporation, its subsidiaries, and management (“Murray Energy”) may have engaged in a pattern of illegal activity, extorting millions in financial contributions from employees and vendors for Republican candidates running for public office,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman Chris Redfern wrote to U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach.

Two Murray Energy managerial sources told The New Republic that the company pressures employees into giving money to the Murray Energy political action committee (PAC) and to Republican candidates. In addition, internal documents revealed that the company tracks which employees are and are not making contributions. Employees of the company allegedly fear that if they do not make the political contributions and attend fundraisers, they will face repercussions including demotions and being refused bonuses.

Murray Energy has given more than $1.4 million to Ohio state and federal candidates for public office, with the majority of that money going to Republicans.

The energy company has also been accused of forcing employees to attend an August rally with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Coal miners said they feared being fired if they did not attend the event. Images from that event have been used in Romney campaign ad, sparking a Federal Elections Commission complaint by the liberal group OhioProgress.

Murray Energy denies any wrongdoing. In a statement, the company said the allegations “are simply an attempt to silence Murray Energy and its owners from supporting their coal mining employees and families by speaking out against President Barack Obama’s well known and documented War on Coal.”

“It is unfortunate that there are political entities in America, such as The New Republic and the Ohio Democratic Party, that will go to no limits to destroy innocent people to get their candidates elected,” Murray Energy added.

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Paul Ryan ends interview after being pressed on guns and taxes

By Eric W. DolanMonday, October 8, 2012 19:22 EDT

Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan on Monday ended an interview with ABC12 in Michigan after being questioned about how he would prevent gun violence in the United States.

During the interview, Ryan denied the U.S. had a “gun problem.” He said the country only had a “crime problem.”

“If you take a look at the gun laws we have, I don’t even think President Obama is proposing more gun laws,” Ryan told the interviewer. “We have good strong gun laws. We have to make sure we enforce our laws. We have lots of laws that aren’t being properly enforced. We need to make sure we enforce these laws, but the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character, that is civil society. That is what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another make sure they can realize the value in one another.”

“And you can do all that by cutting taxes?” the interviewer asked.

At that point, Ryan ended the interview, saying the reporter had asked a “strange” question and put words in his mouth.

“The reporter knew he was already well over the allotted time for the interview when he decided to ask a weird question relating gun violence to tax cuts,” spokesman Brendan Buck told BuzzFeed. “Ryan responded as anyone would in such a strange situation. When you do nearly 200 interviews in a couple months, eventually you’re going to see a local reporter embarrass himself.”

The National Rifle Association has endorsed the Romney-Ryan ticket last week, even though Romney has previously described assault rifles as “instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.”

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Really ? My God ....

Romney refuses to face kids on Nickelodeon after vow to defund Big Bird

By David EdwardsMonday, October 8, 2012 16:14 EDT

After recently promising to end funding for beloved Sesame Street character Big Bird, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is now refusing to take questions from children on a Nickelodeon special, Kids Pick the President: The Candidates.

Although both then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) appeared on the special in 2008, only Obama has agreed to participate this year, the network said on Monday.

“By answering kids’ questions directly, candidates show respect for kids,” host Linda Ellerbee said. “We are disappointed that Mitt Romney wouldn’t take the time to answer the questions, but are thrilled that President Obama participated in the special.”

Deputy National Press Secretary Adam Fetcher told TMZ that Romney had decided to “play hookey” because he couldn’t even handle questions from America’s youth.

“Kids demand details, and I’m sure they want some answers on why Romney could increase their class sizes, eliminate their teacher’s jobs, raise taxes on their families and slash funding for Big Bird,” Fetcher quipped. “‘The dog ate my homework’ just doesn’t cut it when you’re running for President.”

During a presidential debate last week Romney had told moderator Jim Lehrer, “I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not gonna keep on spending money on things to borrow from China to pay for.”

Obama, who recorded his Nickelodeon appearance on Monday, took questions from kids about gun control, the economy, immigration, marriage equality, bullying, obesity and his most embarrassing moment.

“I’m running into doors and desks all the time,” the president said.

Nickelodeon’s Kids Pick the President: The Candidates airs at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Oct. 15. Kids will have a chance to vote online between Oct. 15 and Oct. 22.

Mitt Romney Calls the EPA 'Out of Control' For Wanting to Make Sure Our Drinking Water is Safe

By Heather

During the Mike Huckabee Republican Presidential Debate forum held on Fox this Saturday night, Mitt Romney was asked by moderator Scott Pruit whether heaven forbid his head of the EPA might not be that different from President Obama's choice to lead that agency.

Romney responded by throwing a whole lot of red meat to the GOP base with whether the federal government and the EPA ought to be allowed to regulate fracking on a national level and said it should be left to the states, because heaven forbid Romney might want to concern himself over whether fracking is polluting the drinking water around the country, as Pro Publica has documented here -- Fracking or on whether states are complying with the Clean Water Act with their fracking operations.

As Think Progress has also noted -- Bringing Fracking to the Surface: More Scrutiny Needed on Natural Gas Development -- there are a whole lot more concerns that need to be examined before we just allow these drilling operations to go on without more scrutiny.

I would assume Romney is more concerned about which of those companies are contributing to his political campaign.

Rough transcript below the fold from this Saturday's "forum."

PRUITT: Well Governor, you've traveled Oklahoma, you know that Oklahoma is a leader, in energy from oil and gas to coal to wind. So when energy CEO's tell me that your EPA, or your EPA administrator may not be much different than the president's now, what do you say to that?

ROMNEY: Well, they don't know what I would do if I were the president of the United States. You know, one of my good friends is Mike Leavitt who was the EPA administrator under George W. Bush and I've asked some of the oil and gas company executives, what was it like under Mike Leavitt and they said it was a whole lot better than it is today.

I think the EPA has gotten completely out of control for a very simple reason. It is a tool in the hands of the president to crush the private enterprise system, to crush our ability to have energy, whether it's oil, gas, coal, nuclear... there's a real effort on the part of some in the president's party that don't like the American enterprise system and are trying to find a way to do everything they can to impede the growth of our economy and our energy independence.

And I look at the effort on the EPA for instance to step in the way of fracking and eliminate the potential in some states to have our access to natural gas and to oil and say look, this is all an effort to just say let's go solar and wind and let's raise the cost of energy dramatically.

That's in my view, it's just entirely opposite of the view that we need to have a federal government that sees its job as helping the private sector grow and thrive and add jobs.

PRUITT: Well Governor, you've traveled Oklahoma, you know that Oklahoma is a leader, in energy from oil and gas to coal to wind. So when energy CEO's tell me that your EPA, or your EPA administrator may not be much different than the president's now, what do you say to that?

ROMNEY: Well, they don't know what I would do if I were the president of the United States. You know, one of my good friends is Mike Leavitt who was the EPA administrator under George W. Bush and I've asked some of the oil and gas company executives, what was it like under Mike Leavitt and they said it was a whole lot better than it is today.

I think the EPA has gotten completely out of control for a very simple reason. It is a tool in the hands of the president to crush the private enterprise system, to crush our ability to have energy, whether it's oil, gas, coal, nuclear... there's a real effort on the part of some in the president's party that don't like the American enterprise system and are trying to find a way to do everything they can to impede the growth of our economy and our energy independence.

And I look at the effort on the EPA for instance to step in the way of fracking and eliminate the potential in some states to have our access to natural gas and to oil and say look, this is all an effort to just say let's go solar and wind and let's raise the cost of energy dramatically.

That's in my view, it's just entirely opposite of the view that we need to have a federal government that sees its job as helping the private sector grow and thrive and add jobs.

PRUITT: Well Governor, you mentioned hydraulic fracturing and you know that that's revolutionary now with the natural gas industry as far as extracting natural gas. The states have promise in that area right now on the regulation standpoint. The current EPA administrator is marching toward having the federal government oversee the hydraulic fracturing. Would you put a stop to that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. They, I think the EPA and those extreme voices in the environmental community and in the President's own party are just frustrated beyond belief that the states have the regulatory authority over fracking. And right now I guess it's something close to seventy percent of the oil wells in this country that have been tracked, so states have been managing this and managed it well.

But the EPA wants to be able to get in and grab more power and basically try and move the whole economy away from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and push it into the renewables.

Look, we all like the renewables. But renewables alone are not going to power this economy. And yeah, I would, among other things, I would get the EPA out of its effort to manage carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and trucks.

Look, that was not a pollutant within the meeting of the legislation that authorized the EPA. It is of all the agencies in Washington, it is the one most being used by this President to try and hold down and crush and insert the federal government into the life of the private sector.

Dana Milbank said something very telling, for a change, to Howard Kurtz:

MILBANK: Exactly, that's when it should be done. The other thing that I think was going on here -- I was out there in Denver as you were. You know what was up on every reporters' screen that I looked at was Twitter.

Basically the reporters were having a conversation with themselves rather than watching the debate, and this idea gelled early on that Mitt Romney was having a big night, Obama was having a lousy night, which was generally true, but it accentuated it, and basically there was a groupthink going on there that was -- that was that this is a really big bad thing for Obama, and I think that we probably did our readers and viewers a disservice.

KURTZ: A groupthink, Amy Holmes?

HOLMES: It wouldn't be surprising and it wouldn't be the first time. I'm fascinated that reporters were looking more at Twitter than at the debate proceedings and what was happening on stage.

You know, clearly, the viewers, readers deserve a lot more than that, than what is it, 140 characters per tweet. And they expect the reporters to be watching and reporting what they are seeing, not having this internal conversation that then turns --

(The segment was about the B.S. video that Hannity said would destroy the world, but the video was a dud.)

I was on Twitter for awhile, and I had to shut it down because tweets were flying across the screen so fast that I couldn't keep up. I bet the media sets up lists and just follows their buddies. But it's a big problem.Journalists should get off Twitter and watch the debate, without being influenced by their pals, and then report on what they actually saw instead of what the emerging narrative is. I imagine none of them wanted to dispute the narrative their colleagues were pumping out and risk being ostracized for having an independent thought. But Americans and their bosses are paying them to cover events and not to tweet it.

In the first segment, Kurtz wondered why the media didn't report on all the whoppers Mitt told. It was a valid point. But maybe their Twitter obsession is trumping the truth and facts. Straight-out lying is the conservative tactic these days.

KURTZ: Terry Smith, let's stipulate that Obama lost this debate. He was flat, meandering. Romney was focused and energetic. The media have made it sound like the biggest fiasco in the history of debating. Is that a bit over the top?

TERENCE SMITH: Yes, of course, it's over the top. It's not a disaster. It was -- it was a flat night, not a good night obviously for the president. But I have to say, news organizations, and particularly my good friend Chris Matthews know this, go into a meltdown when they're confronted with a surprise. It was a surprise. Remember going in, everybody anticipated that Obama would be quite in charge and Romney would be struggling.

So it was, of course, mainly stylistic, the failing, not substantive, because going home after watching it, I listened to it, C-Span radio ran it again, and Obama wasn't that bad.

--

KURTZ: But do you agree with my point that if you hear the media echo chamber saying over and over and over again, that this was a calamity for the president, that that can influence how people the event?

DRUCKER: Well, how the media covers things always influences how people remember the event. I mean, if you look at the presidential race, it has been very influenced by how the media has portrayed various events.

KURTZ: OK. Terry talked about listening to it on the radio. I was in Denver. I saw a different debate than most Americans because I didn't see -- and we can put some of this up here. I didn't see the split screens. I didn't see the reaction shots when the president was looking down often and Romney looked more energetic. We see that here.

And that, I think, especially what the media is focused on, the body language of the debate changed the way you looked at. I was more focused on what they were saying. So, it didn't seem to me that Obama had done so badly. -- KURTZ: Terry, I understand the focus on the theater of it. It is a theatrical performance. And I understand the focus on Big Bird and things like that. But here you have Mitt Romney who on the one hand seemed to be backing way from part of what he's been saying all year, he's not going to raise what high income people pay, but almost -- I mean, almost every independent study shows that he cannot pay for this through closing deductions and loopholes, and he hasn't said which deductions and loopholes he would close.

Why has there not been more media focus on this very central question? --

KURTZ: But why has the headline, why the front page story, why the top of the newscast not dealt with -- you know, not just Romney's tax cut and the questions about it, but Romney saying he likes part of Obamacare, he would still cover pre-existing conditions. Well, not so much if you look at the details. He said he likes part of the Dodd/Frank banking law, even though he's calling for its abolition.

It seems to me when it comes to the substance, the press has somewhat fallen down on the job here. Tell me I'm wrong.

SMITH: No, I tend to agree with you. I saw stories the next day that said that this is the moderate Mitt, that he moved to the center, that this was really a significant thing, and it was so reported.

So I think it was covered. I think you're talking mainly about emphasis, and was there enough emphasis on really disputable figures on both sides, I must say. They both fudged. --

KURTZ: Wait a minute. What if candidates get up there and they lie and they distort and they exaggerate?

DRUCKER: If it's a lie as simple as the sky is brown and we all know it's blue, that's one thing. But there have been competing studies, Republicans trotting out conservative-based studies, Democrats trotting out liberal-based studies about what these tax plans would do. And so, what you'd you get, as in most campaigns, is in a sense a muddle over values and how to attack a problem that ultimately is up to the voters.

And it's really unclear whether either of these candidates is telling the truth or in a sense arguing for something that can't be done until they may have a change to do it or not.

Drucker is playing a Villager apologist in much of this, but Howard's questions are valid. Why aren't candidates called out for lying? A liar is a liar. Romney smiled and lied.

KURTZ: But here's a fact that's not unclear. Romney says that when -- Romney essentially has a secret plan. He says when he unveils which deductions and loopholes he's going to close, although he's taken things like the home mortgage deductions off the table, then you will see that his tax plan won't increase the deficit. That in and of itself is a pretty central fact in this debate, but not if you look at the media coverage.

MASON: No, that's true. And I think the fact that we have fact checkers playing such an important role in campaign coverage now gives campaign reporters a pass on not covering those substantive issues. Reporters aren't good at math. That's not news.

KURTZ: Then they need remedial math.

David Atkins:

What if President Obama had spent an entire year campaigning on a $5 trillion stimulus program comprised entirely of government spending? What if that spending were on programs as unpopular, say, as tax cuts for the rich?

And what if, when confronted about the notion that this plan might add to the federal deficit, the President answered that it was revenue neutral, because he promised to cut $5 trillion in other spending to make up for it, even though said spending doesn't exist? What if the President refused to state any of the specifics of the spending that would be cut, even when asked about it directly on a friendly network like MSNBC?

And what would the reaction be if, during the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney called out the President on this spending plan, only to hear back that the President had never suggested any sort of plan like that in the first place? What if the moderator had then refused to interrupt and correct the record, allowing a "he-said-she-said" vacuous argument to take place for 20 minutes?

What would the reaction of the press establishment be? What sort of bias would the media be said to have? Would the President have been awarded a debate victory on the basis of that response?

We have a very, very broken media and political system in this country.

Exactly. If Obama had said that the stimulus created 20 million jobs I think there would be a media meltdown, but when Mitt says his health-care plan will cover pre-existing conditions -- it's crickets.

MASON: That is definitely true. But they can cover the broader issues. They want to cover other things.

KURTZ: They want to cover the theater of it and the polls and the momentum and the image-making.

MASON: That's what gets the hits on the Web site, not a substantive story about tax rates.

Did you know the Beltway press would rather cover Broadway?

KURTZ: Is it simply that -- I've seen 20 times the level of coverage about what Romney said about Big Bird and cutting off the subsidy to PBS, than anything else. Is it the other stuff, the stuff we're talking about here, is it just considered too boring to get hits on the Web site, or ratings for a television show?

MASON: It is. Would that journalism were still the church of truth? It's not. It's a profit-driven industry and the profit gets smaller and smaller. We're talking about Big Bird.

Profits trump news.

KURTZ: This was the most -- talking about social media here for a moment -- this was the most tweeted political event ever, 10.3 million Twitter messages, more than for the whole Democratic convention in just those 90 minutes. How does that change the way the people experience the debate if they're online and sharing and debating with their friends?

MASON: It does. I notice people paying much more attention to Twitter than what was being said on TV, and following the debate through Twitter rather than experiencing it as a television event.

I know journalists covering the debates are more focused on who's retweeting them than the substance of the news.

Julie Mason adds some truth telling to the discussion on RS:

MASON: It is. Would that journalism were still the church of truth? It's not. It's a profit-driven industry and the profit gets smaller and smaller. We're talking about Big Bird.

The media is a profit-driven industry. John Harris admitted that the Political uses screaming headlines to generate web links. They have nothing to do with the news.

MASON: It does. I notice people paying much more attention to Twitter than what was being said on TV, and following the debate through Twitter rather than experiencing it as a television event.

I agree that many of the online community loves them some Twitter, but of the 70 million that watched the debate I doubt 7% were on Twitter.

Anyway, here's a message to all the media: Twitter is fun, but not when you're supposed to be working. You already focus on horse-race politics instead of the facts, and Twitter just makes that even more pronounced.

I had a different reaction to that first debate than a lot of people did. I mean I thought – wow. Here’s old moderate Mitt. Where have you been, boy, I missed you all these last few years. But I was paying attention in the last two years, and it was like one of these Bain Capital deals, you know where he’s the closer. So he shows up, doesn’t really know much about the deals and says, tell me what I’m supposed to say to close.

The problem with this deal is the deal was made by severe conservative Mitt. That was how he described himself for two whole years, until three or four days before the debate, they all got together and said, hey, Mitt – this ship is sinking faster than the Titanic, but people are still frustrated about the economy they wanted fixed yesterday. So just show up with a sunny face and say I didn’t say all that stuff I said the last two years. I don’t have that tax plan I had for the last two years. You going to believe me or your lying eyes here? Come on! What are you doing?

And if I’d been the president I might have said, well I hate to get in the way of this. I miss you.

Bill Clinton has the Romney strategy perfectly diagnosed. Romney is going to spend the next month being all things to all people. He is going to say anything. Yesterday, moderate Mitt became pro-choice. Later his campaign walked back his remarks on abortion a couple of hours after he made them.

Some may think that Bill Clinton is a hypocrite for calling out Romney’s lies, when he lied during the Lewinsky scandal. The difference between Clinton and Romney is that Clinton didn’t lie to try to get himself elected president, and more importantly in the eyes of many, Bill Clinton lied about a personal issue.

Bill Clinton didn’t run for president either time on a platform of contradictory lies. This is an intentional strategy on the part of the Romney campaign to muddy the perception of their candidate. I suspect that the Obama campaign will be prepared for the two Romneys, and I would be looking for President Obama to draw the distinction between moderate Mitt and severe conservative Mitt.

The gentle lighthearted tone Bill Clinton demonstrated is probably the best course in dealing with a perpetual avoider of the truth like Romney.

Obama’s likability and personal approval ratings went up after the first debate. People like Obama, and if he can untangle Romney’s web of lies without seeming heavy handed or getting caught up in trying to debunk a rapid fire quagmire of falsehoods, he could have a great deal of success at the next debate.

The trump card for Obama is that people like and trust him more than Romney. If the president uses this to his advantage, he will have a very good night.

Bill Clinton is right. Romney is lying to get elected, but this is nothing new. He did it when he ran for Senate. He employed this tactic again when he ran for governor, and he has used it in both of his presidential campaigns. Bill Clinton showed Obama how to address Romney’s serial lies, without getting tangled up in them.

The Obama campaign now realizes that this election is all about Mitt Romney, and their effectiveness in dealing with Romney’s compulsive lying may determine the outcome of this contest.

The old slugger Bill Clinton knocked one over the fence. Now let’s see what Joe Biden and Barack Obama can do with the game on the line.

President Obama’s latest increase in his approval rating has put him on at the same level as Bill Clinton and Ronald Ronald Reagan during their first terms.

The right loves to compare President Obama to Jimmy Carter but a comparison of presidential approval ratings using Gallup’s data reveals that Obama has much more in common with Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan than he does with recent one term only presidents.

Obama’s overall first term approval rating average is 49%. Bill Clinton’s first term approval rating average was 49.6%, and Ronald Reagan’s was 50.3%. In contrast, George H.W. Bush’s first term approval rating average was 60.9%, and Jimmy Carter’s was 45.5%.

President Obama’s current Gallup weekly approval rating is 52%. At the same point in their first terms, Bill Clinton’s approval rating was 58%, and Ronald Reagan’s was 54%. At roughly the same date in his presidency, Jimmy Carter’s approval rating was 37%. (After losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Carter would sink to 31%.) George H.W. Bush’s approval rating was 34% in mid-October 1992.

Even though Republicans will never admit it, Obama’s approval ratings curve has much more in common with Ronald Reagan than it does with Jimmy Carter. What these numbers tell us is that presidents who either inherit recessions or have one occur during their first terms have lower approval ratings during their first years in office. Once the economy starts to recover, the incumbent president’s approval ratings go up.

As the economy has shown real signs of improvement, Obama has seen his approval rating increase by 6 points in less than two months. Mitt Romney is attempting to argue that President Obama is an economic failure despite the fact that economic data, and the president’s approval ratings suggest the opposite.

Both Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan saw their approval ratings take off after they won a second term. While it is impossible to know for sure, the current trajectory of the economy combined with President Obama’s personal popularity suggests Obama is on a similar track if he wins reelection.

The Republican argument that Obama is an unpopular colossal failure simply doesn’t match up with reality. The Obama that Mitt Romney is running against is a failed left wing socialist that voters are rejecting on a daily basis.

The Gallup data illustrates the reality that Obama is much closer to Bill Clinton in terms of being a personally popular centrist Democrat.

Much like Reagan and Clinton, Obama has personal likability and an appeal to the political middle.

Barack Obama looks more like a potential two term success story than a one term failure.